Visited my mum today; how quickly the awful effects of Alzheimer's Disease spread through a personality. It is devastating to witness and to deal with. I can't believe the strength of people who have to look after partners who are still living with them even once they have become incontinent and argumentative, paranoid and hostile.



My mum has always been a fun-loving person. She enjoys life and enjoys being amused. She has a great sense of humour.
She is now on a floor of the Nightingale Home which gives her great dignity, where the staff will always go that extra mile. I admire them for all they do and all they have to put up with from dealing with double incontinence, with people like my mum who no longer uses a toilet but smears her waste products over the walls, her bed and herself as well as hiding the stuff in cupboards and drawers. I admire the staff for taking some dreadful verbal racist abuse from people they look after with such tenderness and love. You can see the love they have for my mum. Yet i fear it's all too late....



As I got out of the lift on her floor this afternoon my mum was walking past and I was able to call her; it took a moment or two for her to realise it was me and she greeted me with something like "About time too, where have you been?" It's difficult to understand what she's saying now - her sentences contain words that don't relate although she obviously believes that she's making sense. Now and again she'll indicate that she knows she's spoken rubbish but for the most part you have to try to make responses that might just fit the bill. 'Really?', " Did you think so?", 'You are so right!" etc



We collected her friend who used to be mum's inseparable companion when she lived on the floor above. This is the only downside to the move to Ronson Floor - leaving Doris behind. It's set mum back, particularly as she can no longer talk sense enough to make new friends. We all went down to the coffee shop for tea and then out to sit in the gardens for a while. This was all fine; mum was 'too hot' when the sun came out and 'too cold' when it went behind a cloud - par for the course really. At one point another lady, Eva, joined us and she and Doris talked about the fact that they were getting older. Eva maintained that she didn't get old, she stayed young all the time. She turned to mum for confirmation and what she got was "The dog that came in the other day was very nice; I played with it'. Unfortunately Eva thought mum had referred to HER as a dog! So that took a bit of sorting out.

All went well till we got back to mum's floor and then I saw the curtain come down on her face; she shut herself off from everyone and if we spoke to her or tried to disract her she got verbally aggressive and agitated. She no longer knew me or responded.

That was the third week in a row that this had happened - it doesn't get any easier to bear....